CTRL + ALT + DEL = GOP POW FTW?

Is John McCain about to "reboot" his campaign? Five Thirty Eight's Nate Silver thinks so, and he points to this morning's Bill Kristol column as a possible "trial balloon" for this strategy. Kristol writes:

It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.

He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed. ...

The 2008 campaign is now about something very big — both our future prosperity and our national security. Yet the McCain campaign has become smaller.

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.

Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest ...

At Wednesday night’s debate at Hofstra, McCain might want to volunteer a mild mea culpa about the extent to which the presidential race has degenerated into a shouting match. And then he can pledge to the voters that the last three weeks will feature a contest worthy of this moment in our history.

He’d enjoy it. And he might even win it.

Silver suggests that Matt Drudge is now trumpeting a McCain "comeback" -- based on very questionable evidence -- in order to pave the way for a post-reboot argument that "firing the campaign" wasn't a "desperate stunt," because McCain "already had the momentum." Hmm.

My initial thoughts on this: 1) it all seems highly unlikely; 2) if McCain tries it, it won't work (the media won't buy it, and Obama will deftly deflect it, as he's deflected McCain's previous stunts); 3) McCain is much more likely to pretend to do it than to actually do it (just like he pretended to suspend his campaign); 4) one of the reasons McCain won't do it is because he isn't actually that much of a "happy warrior"; and/but 5) if McCain were to actually do what Kristol suggests, I'd be favorably impressed... but I'd still almost certainly vote for Obama. (Though Kristol's "Democratic Congress" argument is reasonably compelling. For my part, I'm definitely rooting against a filibuster-proof Senate -- though, as a Tennessee voter, I have no say over that, as Lamar Alexander is not one of the threatened Republicans.)

Early voting in Tennessee, incidentally, begins on Wednesday.